Success in football is determined by a number of matters: the ability of the manager, players performing at the right level, injuries and sheer luck, and in Scotland, a clubs determination to influence officials with an exaggerated sense of grievance. Apparently.
But transfer business has an even greater impact than dodgy penalties. This is one area Celtic need to get right over the next two windows. Our performance, not just in the summer window, but across our last three transfer windows has been poor. There is often a lag in outcomes before the impact of a window is felt. The £32m spent in the summer of 2024 failed to see many minutes on the pitch a year later, during Champions League qualification, for example.
The CIES Football Observatory published their survey of the “world’s smartest clubs on the transfer market since January 2021”. Tony Bloom has two clubs in the top 10: Brighton (2nd) and Union SG (8th); I’m sure he didn’t bet on that outcome (my Tony Bloom man-crush has faded a little this week).
The top 20 has some lessons for us: Atalanta, Napoli, Bologna, Udinese and Lecce, demonstrate how well the medium-to-small Italian clubs have figured out how to progress. Is it surprising so many young Scottish players have bounced after moving there?
Benfica are there, as are Feyenoord, but not Ajax. The Amsterdamers beat Celtic to the signing of €12m striker Kasper Dolberg in the summer, which traumatised many of us. Dolberg has returned one goal in all competitions since, a consolation in a defeat to Excelsior. Not that the lad’s had much of a chance, his only appearances have been off the bench.
The Ajax-Dolberg-Celtic tale says so much about where we were in the summer. Unable to attract a player who cannot get a game at a team woefully underperforming this season. There are so many reasons why we should not have wasted time on this exercise, it scarcely needs explaining.
Celtic are 19th in the table, between Manchester City and Leipzig. How can that be? I hear you ask. The lag works both ways. Analysis of Celtic still benefits from earlier signings, up until that of Nicolas Kuhn in January 2024, who left the premises this summer. The full impact of the subsequent windows has not shown up yet.
Being “smartest” in the transfer window does not guarantee success, but it’ll outperform being thick, no matter how good your ‘exaggerated sense of grievance’ game is.
Looking in from the outside, it’s easy to say, ‘be more like Bloom’ (although not with that other stuff), but as many observers will note, getting this right is not easy. What is easy, is to stick to the data. Recognise what succeeds and what fails and always back your winning hand. A lack of observance of this principle in football is quite astonishing.
Postscript: I looked down the list and eventually found Aberdeen, but after continuous scrolling I ran out of patience trying to find another Scottish club. Looks like Bloom’s magic touch has yet to hit Hearts.